Alcatraz

by David Ward

  Having staff members reside on the same small island where they worked made them available in the event of an emergency situation, but more important it allowed the warden to establish strict rules for employee conduct both off and on the job. When not working, employees would be prohibited from discussing any aspect of prison operations with any person outside the federal prison system; this prohibition was intended to apply in particular when employees took the prison boats over to San Francisco, where eager newspaper reporters might be waiting. Relatives and close friends could visit employees on the island, but each visit required permission to board the prison launch. By limiting the ability of employees to socialize with people in the outside the world, the rules would greatly reduce opportunities for establishing corrupting relations. On the job, guards were told to refrain from talking with prisoners, apart from issuing orders and directing routine activities. This rule was intended to eliminate opportunities for prisoners to try to corrupt or improperly influence employees.

  It was important that all rank-and-file officers and industries staff receive close supervision, and this was made possible by the small cell house and the limited inmate work and recreation areas. Compared to their counterparts at the big Atlanta and Leavenworth penitentiaries, supervisors at Alcatraz would have an easier time keeping tabs on both employees and prisoners.

  A key policy decision by Cummings and Bates was to permanently bar the press from the island. Once gangsters, high-profile kidnappers, and bank robbers had been sent off to prison, they should not be further “glorified” by news stories or reports pertaining to their prison experiences. Continued attention from the press would only bolster the egos and reputations of big shot offenders and possibly earn them sympathy from the public. Wary of negative press, federal officials assumed that if reporters had access to inmates, they would write articles critical of staff actions, administrative decisions, the prison regime, and probably all of the above. The only person authorized to release information or news about any person or event at Alcatraz would be the warden.39 Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington, D.C., would issue statements only on those occasions when government policy needed clarification or the justification for the prison needed to be repeated.

  With Alcatraz destined to house a relatively small number of troublesome convicts—less than 1 percent of the total federal prison population—special rules were established for transfer to and from the island prison. Offenders would not be committed directly to Alcatraz after conviction in federal courts. A convict would merit transfer to the island only after he had demonstrated his inability or unwillingness to adjust at other prisons, or because his stature in the convict subculture or as a “public enemy” gave him undue influence over other inmates or members of the staff. Transfer from Alcatraz was similarly constrained. A punitive measure at other penitentiaries, transfer to another prison would be a reward for good conduct on the island. Yet it would come only after four or five years of improved conduct. No man was to be paroled directly from Alcatraz island. (According to guard Robert Baker, this policy was to assure Bay Area residents that Alcatraz convicts would not be released directly to their communities.) The only other legitimate way for an inmate to leave Alcatraz was by dying, being deported, or serving every day of his sentence (going out “flat”).

  READYING ALCATRAZ FOR THE FIRST INMATES

  In late 1933 the Bureau of Prisons turned to the task of refurbishing the military prison. James A. Johnston—former warden at two California state prisons, San Quentin and Folsom—was appointed warden in November, began supervising the refurbishing process on January 2, 1934, and moved into the warden’s home on the island on April 5. Trained as a lawyer, Johnston was an influential businessman and banker who had important political connections to California’s United States Senator Hiram Johnson. But Johnston was also known to Sanford Bates as a member of the Wickersham commission. While Johnston assembled a staff, he worked with Bates and BOP headquarters to outline the policies and procedures that would be in place for the first prisoners, who were expected to arrive during the following summer.

  Instead of transferring experienced guards from other federal prisons to staff the new special-purpose penitentiary, Bates and Johnston decided that operations would begin with a large contingent of new officers. The advantage to this strategy was that new employees could be selected and trained as BOP administrators wished. The FBI was moving to establish higher standards for recruitment, training, and supervision of agents, and federal prison officials intended to move in the same direction. Another advantage of hiring guards with no prior experience was that they would not bring with them bad habits learned under other administrations or inappropriate relationships with any prisoners.

  In addition to the custodial staff there were several stewards who managed kitchen operations, supervisors of inmate work crews at laundry, tailor, carpenter, and mat shops, two chaplains, a medical staff, including physicians who worked for the Public Health Service and orderlies (later called medical technical assistants), electricians, plumbers, painters, clerical workers, and a business manager.

  To make the old military prison secure enough to control the federal prison system’s most influential convicts and its most prolific escape artists, the Bureau of Prisons undertook major modifications of three of the existing cell blocks. The old, flat, soft steel grills and doors that covered the front of each cell on both sides of B and C blocks and the B side of A block were replaced with bars of tool-proof steel; two gun cages were erected at each end of the cell house. Three new guard towers, to be manned around the clock, were constructed to supplement the existing one, and a fifth tower was installed on the northeast side of the powerhouse for use in emergency situations.40 Barbed wire fencing was strung between walls and buildings close to the sea and on the cliffs themselves. A new armory with tool-proof steel doors was constructed in the administration building outside, and immediately adjacent to, the main cell house. New steel detention sash windows were installed in the laundry and workshop buildings. Tear gas canisters were attached to the tops of columns in the center of the inmate dining room and above the main gate between the administrative offices and the cell house.

  A “dead line” marked by orange buoys three hundred yards offshore ringed the island; outsiders who ventured within the dead line risked being fired on. Large warning signs painted on exterior walls and erected at other points on the island made the prohibition against coming too close clearly visible to vessels approaching Alcatraz from any direction. Employee housing—barracks for single men, apartments for families, and the houses for the warden, chief medical officer, and other senior staff—was remodeled and renovated. As the Bureau of Prisons completed its retooling and the army vacated Alcatraz Island on June 19, 1934, Warden Johnston announced that the prison was open for business.

  Anticipating the arrival of the first inmates, the public and the press became intensely curious about the facilities, the convicts who would occupy them, and the regime those convicts would face. Reporters’ desire for information, however, ran up against the policy decisions to bar the press from the island and limit the release of public information.

  In July Warden Johnston informed Director Bates that wire service and newspaper reporters were very anxious to obtain information about certain features of the prison; for one thing, they wanted to know how the prisoners would be controlled and prevented from escaping. “They have heard about gun detectors, wooden gates, light beams, robot guards, and electric eyes,” said Johnston, “and some of them seem to think that we have secret stuff that we are concealing.” The press also wanted to know the names of the “public enemies” to be shipped to Alcatraz and the dates and details of their transfers. Most reporters were assuming that Capone, Kelly, Bailey, and Albert Bates would be included, along with the surviving associates of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, and (when apprehended) the leaders of the Barker-Karpis gang—in short, the most highly pub
licized criminals in the country. Johnston suggested that reporters be allowed to tour the prison before any inmates arrived “so as to be able to deny such requests immediately after we open.”41

  Director Bates gave his approval. But he advised Warden Johnston to make only the most general responses during the press tour and to deny specifics due to “security considerations.” He recommended that Johnston purposely create “an air of mystery” about the measures that would safeguard the country from the prisoners.

  On August 1, 1934, Attorney General Cummings and Director Bates officially activated Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary. Two weeks later, just before the arrival of the first inmates from Leavenworth and Atlanta, the members of the press were given a guided tour of the prison—on the occasion of an inspection of the island by Attorney General Cummings. Reporters’ requests to learn the identities of the notorious group of desperadoes who would soon populate the island were not assuaged by the tour. From that day until the prison closed in March 1963, the “air of mystery” so carefully crafted by the Bureau of Prisons shrouded the lives of inmates and employees and every event that occurred on the island. Again and again, a lack of accurate information led to speculation, rumor, and fantasy.

  3

  SELECTING THE “WORST OF THE WORST”

  It was one thing to design a new federal prison for the likes of Machine Gun Kelly and Harvey Bailey and another to fill the 270 cells on Alcatraz with inmates appropriate to the prison’s mission. Bureau of Prisons officials knew from the beginning that once all the Kellys, Baileys, Capones, and other “public enemies” in the federal prison system—men federal officials many years later called the “worst of the worst”—were designated as Alcatraz transferees, there would still be room for a large number of prisoners of lesser notoriety. Therefore, in the autumn of 1933, about the same time the federal government announced the future opening of a prison on Alcatraz Island, the BOP set about determining who those other prisoners would be.

  In October 1933 Director Bates asked each of the wardens at Leavenworth, the Ft. Leavenworth Annex, Atlanta, McNeil Island, and the new prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to nominate “not over fifty men who might be classified as desperate or difficult enough to be suitable for transfer to Alcatraz Island.”1 As Henry Hill, the warden at Lewisburg, understood it, Bates wanted the wardens to choose “unruly, antisocial, agitating characters” who were sources of “constant trouble,” men known as “potential ‘escapers’ and who by virtue of the terms of their sentence and the nature of their crimes would escape if possible,” and men who “attract unto themselves numbers of prisoners through whom they might seek to control certain elements of the population.”2

  The opportunity to transfer a large number of troublemakers all at once to another prison came infrequently in the careers of federal prison administrators, so the wardens were no doubt enthusiastic about filling the director’s request. Knowing that their performance was judged not on the success of their industrial or work programs, or on their prisons’ recidivism rate, but on whether they could maintain order in their institutions, they were happy to remove from their responsibility the prisoners they believed were most likely to cause riots, escapes, deaths, and unrest.

  At Bureau headquarters, Bates and his deputies reviewed the lists submitted by the wardens. They rejected many of the candidates proposed by the wardens of Atlanta and Leavenworth on the grounds that they were exhibiting evidence of mental health problems or had been selected only because they were nuisances. The Bureau officials sent the lists back to the penitentiaries with requests for revisions or further justifications. The wardens provided better arguments for the inclusion of certain prisoners and substituted the names of other candidates. By the time the refurbishing of Alcatraz neared completion in the early summer of 1934, upward of two hundred federal prisoners had been identified as Alcatraz transfers.

  Each warden had to provide adequate justification for including an inmate on his list. Typically, the wardens cited such personality traits as “desperate,” “constant troublemaking,” “agitator,” and “unruly.” Here is a sampling of recommendations from the wardens at Atlanta, Leavenworth, and McNeil Island:

  a dangerous, mentally not normal, prisoner who has already stabbed one inmate with a pair of shears . . . claimed he was sorry that he did not kill the man [and] threatens when he comes out [of isolation] he will come out cutting.3

  was recently searched and shotgun shells together with a piece of pipe designed for a shotgun were found. He had planned a mass escape by shooting a tower guard and taking the power boat.4

  slippery as an eel, escaped three times from U.S. Marshals on way to prison. Was in plot for mass escape. Will make a break any time, a very dangerous man.5

  these men are all potential killers and have been actively engaged in a conspiracy, to smuggle guns into the institution for use in carrying out their plans of escaping.6

  this inmate is plotting right now . . . to seize our locomotive and escape by crashing through the east gate.7

  Most of the prisoners selected for transfer to Alcatraz were indeed bona fide security risks, but other issues influenced wardens’ choices. Wardens tried to take advantage of the transfer opportunity to get rid of prisoners whose behavior indirectly threatened order, including men (particularly if they were physically powerful) whose bizarre, unpredictable, or assaultive behavior jeopardized the physical well-being of staff or disturbed the peace and quiet of cell blocks. It was difficult to draw the line in some cases between custodial risks and those who were suffering genuine breakdowns in mental health. In any case, wardens and their subordinates were appreciative of the opportunity to put their problem inmates into the care of another warden.

  Foremost among prisoners who made nuisances of themselves were the “writ writers.” They annoyed wardens by filing briefs in federal court questioning elements of their arrest, conviction, or sentence, or they filed complaints about prison conditions and the actions of prison staff. These complaints brought the institution’s business, the staff’s behavior, and the warden’s judgment into question before attorneys and judges, whom BOP staff regarded as ignorant and naive about prison management. Similar troublemakers sought to communicate their complaints about the treatment they were receiving to newspaper reporters, members of Congress, and even to Bureau of Prisons headquarters. Also in the nuisance category were a small number of “aggressive homosexuals” who needed to be controlled for the protection of younger or weaker inmates.

  Finally, there were the big shots of organized crime or gangland, figures who could use their status, substantial financial resources, power of personality, and connections with associates on the outside to manipulate or seduce staff into providing favors or privileges not granted to the general inmate population. In most cases, the inclusion of these inmates on the transfer-to-Alcatraz lists was already a foregone conclusion.

  Each federal warden had little trouble finding a place on his proposed transfer list for all the notorious gangsters, bank robbers, and kidnappers in his custody. But in each penitentiary such prisoners filled only a small percentage of the available slots. For the most part, therefore, the wardens offered up the names of convicts who were known only to other inmates and their own employees.

  Press speculation about the identities of the prisoners to be transferred focused on the big-name offenders, and in some cases they were correct—Al Capone was included in the list of men to be shipped from Atlanta, Machine Gun Kelly headed the Leavenworth list, and Albert Bates and Harvey Bailey topped the list of transfers from the U.S. Penitentiary Annex at Fort Leavenworth.

  THE ALCATRAZ EXPRESS

  Wardens and Bureau officials debated about the best way to transport the chosen prisoners to Alcatraz. Some wanted them moved in small groups in prison cars that would be attached to trains on their normal runs; Assistant Director Hammack and others believed the prisoners should be sent in large groups on special prison trains. Hammack was wor
ried about using regular trains because information about the trains’ routes and stops would be too easily acquired by associates of the transported prisoners and by reporters. He compared the transport of prisoners in many small groups to “dropping our marbles all over the lot.”

  Hammack believed that transport by special train could be accomplished without publicity and in virtual secrecy: “I would be willing to guarantee the whole special train could move from Atlanta to Alcatraz with less publicity than you would be able to accomplish if you sent Al Capone on the same trip by regular service with any number of guards you chose to select.”8 The relative security of the special-train method hinged on the ability of the BOP to work with the railroad companies to control the conditions of transport. The final plan proposed by Hammack reflected extensive negotiations with the railroads:

  The railroad authorities have promised us there will be no publicity. They hope to get more business out of us and you could be sure they would live up to their agreement in that respect. Not only that, but the railroad authorities have agreed they will not stop the special train at regular stations, and, in fact, the only occasion for stopping the train would be to change the crew, take on water or fuel, or perform some regular service. This would be done in the yard or at some point distant from the regular passenger station. Nobody but the train crew would know where the stops were to be. To safeguard this phase the railroad companies have agreed they will have a sufficient number of special agents and detectives in the yard or at the service station to insure no unauthorized person even approaches the train. It would be impossible for anybody to know who was on the train unless the information was given out at Washington or at the institution from which the transfer originated. If the prisoners were selected before hand, the train placed in the prison yard, carefully searched, the prisoners moved in and properly shackled, then the entire party could move out without anybody knowing anything about it except the officers inside the institution.9